The Inevitable Caliphate? by Pankhurst Reza

Author:Pankhurst, Reza [Pankhurst, Reza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

Addressing Domestic Grievances

While al-Zawahiri spent his days in an Egyptian jail after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Bin Laden was busy providing logistical and financial support to the jihad in Afghanistan, having travelled there for the first time only days after the arrival of invading Soviet troops in 1979. 23 One was a political detainee who had plotted to overthrow the Egyptian government from the age of sixteen, inspired by the execution of Sayyid Qutb by the regime of Gamal Abdul-Nasser to go down the path to either martyrdom or victory against the corrupted elite. 24 The other was the youngest son of a family with close ties to the Saudi Arabia’s rulers, motivated by the opportunity to fight Jihad against a foreign infidel invader, and who had spent time listening to the lectures of Mohammad Qutb, the elder brother of Sayyid Qutb, who was Professor of Islamic Studies at King Abdul Aziz University.

The differing trajectories of the two men cannot be understood without recognizing the differences in the basis of legitimacy on which the Egyptian and Saudi regimes are based, coupled with a reading from two different books, one known as The Absent Obligation and the other as Defence of the Muslim Lands . Though both books shared the subject of the obligation to wage jihad, they proffered very different conceptions of the nature of that obligation. One was written by Abdus-Salam Faraj and became a core text for al-Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad group, the other was authored by Abdullah Azzam, who was recognized as the head of the Afghan-Arabs and one of Bin Laden’s former teachers in Saudi Arabia.

Azzam’s book encouraged Muslims to take up arms against the Communist Soviet invader in defense of their religion, since “Jihad today is individually obligatory […] on every Muslim,” until “the last piece of Islamic land is freed from the hands of the Disbelievers.” 25 On the other hand, Abdus-Salam Faraj’s The Absent Obligation called for a struggle against the “near enemy,” meaning “the present rulers,” who “have apostatised from Islam,” 26 since “fighting the enemy that is near to us comes before that which is far.” 27 Alternatively, Azzam held that “violence should not be used against Muslim regimes no matter how far they had deviated from shari‘a principles.” 28

The Egyptian regime was considered the near enemy, a government whose leader had apostatized from Islam due to a series of actions thought to be blasphemous, most importantly the failure to rule by the shari‘a and the signing of a peace treaty which recognized the state of Israel in 1979. Living in Egypt and growing up under the shadow of Qutb’s execution and the subsequent failed Military Academy coup of 1974, al-Zawahiri had been arrested, tortured and thrown into jail with his co-defendants because they had, in his words, tried their best to “establish an Islamic state.” 29

The situation in Saudi Arabia was very different, with the al-Saud family basing their legitimacy on Islam and the fact that they were the “guardians of the two holy places” (haramain) .

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